Part of a folding map, “Fort Beauséjour and adjacent country, taken possession of by Colonel Monckton, in June, 1755;” in Mante’s Hist. of the Late War (London, 1772), p. 17. Cf. Des Barres’ Environs of Fort Cumberland, 1781, and various drawn maps in Catal. King’s Library (Brit. Mus.), i. 281.
Three hundred of the young Acadians, the so-called “neutral French,” were found among the defenders of Beauséjour.[977] The council at Halifax had no easy question to solve in determining the next step to be taken.
COLONEL MONCKTON.
After a mezzotint preserved in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. library, in which he is called “Major-General, and Colonel of the Seventeenth Foot, and Governor of New York,” as he later was. Cf. other mezzotints noted in J. C. Smith’s Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, ii. 883; iv. 1,525, 1739. There is a portrait in Entick’s Hist. of the Late War, v. 355. See account of Monckton in Akins’s Nova Scotia Docs., 391.
With the documentary evidence now in hand, chiefly the records of the French themselves, we can clearly see the condition which the English rather suspected than knew in detail.[978] They indeed were aware that the neutrals of Chignecto in 1750 had been in effect coerced to crossing the lines at the neck, while the burning of their houses and barns had been accomplished to prevent their return. They further knew that this gave an increased force of desperate and misguided men to be led by priests like Le Loutre, and encouraged by the French commanders, acting under orders of the central government at Quebec. They had good reason to suspect, what was indeed the fact, that the emissaries of the Catholic church and the civil powers in Canada were confident in the use they could in one way and another make of the mass of Acadians, though still nominally subjects of the British king.[979] Their loyalty had always been a qualified one. A reservation of not being obliged to serve in war against the French had been in the past allowed in their oath; but such reservation had not been approved by the Crown, though it had not been practically disallowed. It was a reservation which in the present conjunction of affairs Governor Lawrence thought it inexpedient to allow, and he required an unqualified submission by oath. He had already deprived them of their arms. The oath was persistently refused and the return of their arms demanded. This act was in itself ominous. The British plans had by this time miscarried in New York and Pennsylvania, and under Braddock the forces had suffered signal defeat. The terms of the New England troops in Acadia were fast expiring. With these troops withdrawn, and others of the Acadian garrisons sent to succor the defeated armies farther west, and with the Canadian government prompted to make the most of the disaffection toward the English and of the loyalty to the French flag which existed within the peninsula, there could hardly have been a hope of the retention of the country under the British flag, unless something could be done to neutralize the evil of harboring an enemy.[980] “In fact,” says Parkman, “the Acadians, while calling themselves neutrals, were an enemy encamped in the heart of the province.”[981] Colonel Higginson (Larger History, etc.) presents the antithesis in a milder form, when he says, “They were as inconvenient as neighbors as they are now picturesque in history.” It has been claimed that the cruelty of deportation might have been avoided by exacting hostages of the Acadians. That involves confidence in the ability of an abjectly priest-ridden people to resist the threats of excommunication, should at any time the emissaries of Quebec find it convenient to sacrifice the hostages to secure success to the French arms. Under such a plan the English might too late learn that military execution upon the hostages was a likely accompaniment of a military disaster which it would not avert. The alternative of deportation was much surer, and self-preservation naturally sought the securest means. Simply to drive the Acadians from the country would have added to the reckless hordes allured by the French in 1750, which had fraternized with the Micmacs, and harassed the English settlements. To deport them, and scatter them among the other provinces, so that they could not combine, was a safer and, as they thought, the only certain way to destroy the Acadians as a military danger. It was a terrible conclusion, and must not be confounded with possible errors in carrying out the plan. The council, taking aid from the naval commanders, decided upon it.[982]
The decision and its execution have elicited opinions as diverse as the characters of those who have the tender and the more rigid passions mixed in them in different degrees. The question, however, is simply one of necessity in war to be judged by laws which exclude a gentle forbearance in regard to smaller for the military advantages of larger communities.